Painted Allegory's Fortunes in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp

Recent and ongoing analyses of literary allegory have emphasized how its fundamental split between figure and conceit generates dynamic instabilities. Focusing on seventeenth-century depictions of art collections, this chapter considers how allegorical instability operates productively in paintings that reflect upon the shifting values of the visual arts in an emergent culture of art collecting. Even as collection pictures allegorize art’s virtues, they promote sensory and material modes of apprehending the world, and address the mobility and fungibility of pictures in an expanding marketplace for luxury goods.